Slashdot Mirror
How to Become Invisible
mdm42 writes "Looks like a theoretical physicist at St. Andrews University in Scotland believes that invisibility may be possible. And its not going to be a potion or a cloak, but will come in the form of a device. " Let's just hope that when the invisible woman arrives, she's played more convincingly than Jessica Alba.
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
/. tells me there's nothing to see.
A story on invisibility, and
This is Mr. E.R. Bradshaw of Napier Court, Black Lion Road London SE5. He can not be seen. Now I am going to ask him to stand up. Mr. Bradshaw will you stand up please
In the distance Mr Bradshaw stands up. There is a loud gunshot as Mr Bradshaw is shot in the stomach. He crumples to the ground
This demonstrates the value of not being seen.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
"I'm invisible!" convincingly enough. It worked for Burt in Soap.
Whippersnappers: Look it up.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
All it takes is a suitably large gravity well. Black holes have been doing this since the dawn of time.
But seriously, all the new light bending materials I've been reading about look neat, but seem to be focused on certain wavelengths. Broad spectrum invisibility will likely be pretty tough.
finally all those hours playing Splinter Cell will pay off!
You mean there's more to invisibility than just talking to women?
I'm standing right behind you.
What?
I can look into a mirror...
I think Joanna Dark had this 6 years ago.
and even if it was possible, we'd be blind while we were invisible. invisible means that there is no light to reflect off of us so that other people can see us. however, if there is no light to reflect off of us, there is no light to reflect off of our eyes, which means we can't see.
He just described the Predator.
I have my own hypothesis about the future. In the near future, Human kind will be able to build AI and robots. From my research, this will come in the form of a computer I am calling "Skynet." It will be neural net CPU, a learning computer.
However, I must insist we take caution when building this advanced new machines, which I am going to call "Terminators," as at some point they may decided that the human race is the enemy.
I urge you all to write your congresspeople to encourage them to take appropriate measures with this "Skynet" in the future.
I also have some theories about a new computer network, which I have coined "The Matrix." It will be very stylish and include kungfu fighting (like the 70's song by Carl Douglas).
If you have any questions, feel free to give me a jingle in the future (which my future self will be five soon).
-John Titor
Sure, who would find a human-sized-walking-lightbulb suspicious?
Old news! Wired ran this story three years ago. The technology isn't any more advanced now than it was then. Military.com published an extremely informative guide to invisibility last year. Much better than TFA.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
If a device is made to either redirect light, or detect light in the environment, absorb it and then project light to match it, then there will be some delay necissary in the process, because you can't send out information before you observe it.
Don't know how significant it would be, but that could result in a slight disjointed projection of the area behind you if you were made 'invisible' with such a device, most observable when one moves.
Thus, the more apt movie reference would be Predator.
Ryan Fenton
so whens he gonna tackle the superman theory?
Yes, they've made 15 prototypes so far. They just can't get past the testing stage. Keep losing them.
FTFS: "And its not going to be a potion or a cloak, but will come in the form of a device."
And here I thought that potions and cloaks were also devices.
Who knew?
And all this time I thought invisibility would be done by using a magic potion like in AD&D. I guess I lose that bet.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Mystery Men proves that invisibility exists already, especially if noone (including yourself) is watching.
/. audience is invisible to the opposite sex.
Heck, most of
You can't handle the truth.
I think Monty Python made being invisible unnecessary with their "How not to be seen" skit.
Just don't hide behind a single shrub in the middle of a field...
-FL
Seems like this would be an ideal way to keep that pesky interstellar radiation away from the meaty bits inside of a crunchy spacecraft.
But then I presume that the person inside the field would not be able to see a thing, if you were inside the field force you would be inside a black "universe". Interesting uh?
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
I love single malt whiskey and I think our professor does too
The military and espionage potential is huge. However I assume the forcefield could play havoc with radar, possibly sonar too. So how would one go about detecting invisible men/women? Infrared? Gaurd dogs?
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not entirely sure about the universe - Einstein
Keep in mind that by bending light around an object, you're preventing that light from being visible to anyone/anything within the field. Essentially, when you were "cloaked", you'd also be blind.
:)
So, there go the recreational usages of such technology...
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
Ok. The extended article compares this theoretical invisiblility to water flowing around a rock. Correct me if I'm wrong (I'm no physicist), but I thought that light doesn't bend like that. It moves in a straight direction at an incredibly fast speed. So, any device that diverts light would cause it to reflect... meaning that if you looked straight on at an invisible person, you would see images from all around the room. It would be very disorienting and you would know that someone was there. Am I wrong?
And this experiment will be done with a ship in Philadelphia?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
He started using his invention immediately after the 2000 election.
Invisibility is already possible. The underlying principle behind it is not technological or mystical but sociological. See the works of Ralph Ellison ("Invisible Man"), Kate Clinton ("In Search of the Invisible Lesbian"), and Grant Morrison ("The Invisibles") for more info.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
... or does anyone else hope this information would become classified if it ever became a reality? If the technology was ever released (or the specifics and not the actual tech) there could be potential for multi million dollar heists and no one would be able to find out. Heck, the way they're talking, it's ALL light that would be manipulated, meaning there would be absolutely no way to track a person who was using it.
So all I gotta do is carry a black hole in my pocket. That's gotta suck...
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
I wonder if this is BadAnalogyGuy in disguise? :)
A most people will have actually seen water flowing around a rock in a creek or a stream will attest, the water doesn't just leave as if nothing was there: there's all sorts of turbulence, especially leaving visibile waves on the surface and even a trail of bubbles if there is sufficient flow to cause aeration.
"Let's just hope that when the invisible woman arrives, she's played more convincingly then Jessica Alba."
I can think of a couple of things involving "invisibility" and "Jessica Alba". The above is not one of them.
A million monkeys and this is the best sig they could come up with...
Let's just hope that someday slashdot will use proper English grammar.
For decades, many science fiction fans around the world have believed invisibility *may* be possible.
jessica cannot be invisible even when she is invisible because she is Jessica
dont blame her for not playing it good enough
Invisibility is theoretically possible, Captain -- selectively bending light. But the power cost is enormous. They may have solved that problem... ST: Balance of terror
Scientist thinks commercial fusion energy may be possible in future...
Scientist thinks arresting the aging process may be possible in future...
Scientist thinks space colonies may be possible in future...
Scientist thinks flying cars may be possible in future...
etc. etc. etc.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
> ... she's played more convincingly then Jessica Alba.
It's 'than' not 'then'.
After the invisble woman is played more convicingly, Jessica Alba does what?
look at me i'm invisible
The technology involved in making anything invisible is so infinitely complex that nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand million, nine hundred and ninety-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a billion it is much simpler and more effective just to take the thing away and do without it. The ultra-famous sciento-magician Effrafax of Wug once bet his life that, given a year, he could render the great megamountain Magramal entirely invisible. Having spent most of the year jiggling around with immense LuxO-Valves and Refracto-Nullifiers and Spectrum-Bypass-O-Matics, he realized, with nine hours to go, that he wasn't going to make it. So, he and his friends, and his friends' friends, and his friends' friends' friends, and his friends' friends' friends' friends, and some rather less good friends of theirs who happened to own a major stellar trucking company, put in what now is widely recognized as being the hardest night's work in history, and, sure enough, on the following day, Magramal was no longer visible. Effrafax lost his bet - and therefore his life - simply because some pedantic adjudicating official noticed (a) that when walking around the area that Magramal ought to be he didn't trip over or break his nose on anything, and (b) a suspicious-looking extra moon. The Somebody Else's Problem field is much simpler and more effective, and what's more can be run for over a hundred years on a single torch battery. This is because it relies on people's natural disposition not to see anything they don't want to, weren't expecting, or can't explain. If Effrafax had painted the mountain pink and erected a cheap and simple Somebody Else's Problem field on it, then people would have walked past the mountain, round it, even over it, and simply never have noticed that the thing was there. -Douglas Adams
That last sentence needs some commas, or must be split up. It's not clear enough as it is.
To me, clear communication is more important than spelling.
Someone needs remedial English to learn the difference between 'then' and 'than'. While one can understand the sentence, it is incorrectly structured. Better, it would read, "Let's just hope that when the invisible woman arrives, she's portrayed more convincingly at that time than by Jessica Alba." Or, "Jessica Alba is hot and should never be invisible."
Click here or here.
Well, that's because as anyone who's read Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy could tell you, they're doing it wrong. You don't need to turn something invisible, which is a horribly complicated thing and needs lots of energy. You just have to turn it into Somebody Else's Problem, in which case the human brain will just filter it out.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
By Patricia Reaney
LONDON (Reuters) - It's unlikely to occur by swallowing a pill or donning a special cloak, but invisibility could be possible in the not too distant future, according to research published on Monday.
Harry Potter accomplished it with his magic cloak. H.G. Wells' Invisible Man swallowed a substance that made him transparent.
But Dr Ulf Leonhardt, a theoretical physicist at St Andrews University in Scotland, believes the most plausible example is the Invisible Woman, one of the Marvel Comics superheroes in the "Fantastic Four".
"She guides light around her using a force field in this cartoon. This is what could be done in practice," Leonhardt told Reuters in an interview. "That comes closest to what engineers will probably be able to do in the future."
Invisibility is an optical illusion that the object or person is not there. Leonhardt uses the example of water circling around a stone. The water flows in, swirls around the stone and then leaves as if nothing was there.
"If you replace the water with light then you would not see that there was something present because the light is guided around the person or object. You would see the light coming from the scenery behind as if there was nothing in front," he said.
In the research published in the New Journal of Physics, Leonhardt described the physics of theoretical devices that could create invisibility. It is a follow-up paper to an earlier study published in the journal Science.
"What the Invisible Woman does is curve space around herself to bend light. What these devices would do is to mimic that curved space," he said.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
From "The Fucking Article":
Although the devices are still theoretical,
End of summary.
Then there's the method used by Ed Bagley Jr. in "Amazon Women on the Moon".
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
if we had a news story for every concept a theoretical physicist was speculating on, we'd have /.!
I've tried to patent this thing three times. Every time I show it to the patent office, and it disappears, I can't find the off switch and I have to go make another one...
"Let's just hope that when the invisible woman arrives, she's played more convincingly then Jessica Alba"
Lets just hope that when there actually IS an invisible woman, she won't have to 'play' anything...
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
"I went to buy some camouflage trousers the other day but I couldn't find any..."
.
They will never know the simple pleasure of a monkey knife fight
Learn to write, moron. That goes for you too, Taco. Nice editing - do you even spend 2 seconds on it?
"I'm invisible!" convincingly enough.
Actually, speaking isn't required. The actual technique is waving your hands in front of you and then snap your fingers.
Of course, it doesn't work when you're wet.
I gave a live demonstration of personal invisibility in high school physics class. I simply didn't show up that day. I got an A++. It was brilliant.
Weeks of coding saves hours of planning.
...I read about it in the Invisible Book of Invisibility.
-
Just follow the average slashdotter to a night club.
but I couldn't find one anywhere
As we presently define society, invisibility is not something that would be integrated well into our environment. We do not possess the social concious of being able to handle such a concept. We relate many aspects of ours lives to how we perceive things visually. Take away this visual stimulus and we become a society out of control. Privacy would be out the window. Driving would be a nightmare. Any kind of social interaction will become suspect. Invisibility is an answer that should not be solved right now.
Big Issue?
Let's just hope that when the invisible woman arrives, she's played more convincingly then[sic] Jessica Alba.
It' a pretty sad statement to say that an actress can't even decently play an INVISIBLE role.
Weeks of coding saves hours of planning.
Another way to become invisible.
1. Build a Starport.
2. Build a connecting Control Tower.
3. Upgrade, add cloaking field for your wraiths.
(Bonus: To stay invisible longer, build an Apollo reactor, gives you +50 energy.)
Yes! HA HA Kudos on that Jessica Alba jab!
I just have to cover my eyes.
1) Sign up a Slashdot account.
2) Check Slashdot multiple times daily.
3) Slowly become invisible to the outsi...
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
I KNEW the latest Bond movie was full of crap! Microscopic cameras and displays.. hah
Wouldn't this device make the person being invisible also blind? If light is going *around* the person, he will not have light going into his eyes, therefore he won't be able to see anything. Am I overlooking (pun intended) something here?
Uncopyrightable: The longest word you can write without repeating a letter.
Yes the invisible cloak that harry potter has is just as feasible. /shrug
I mean besides being old news, the science is based on a comic, some water, and a rock~~
show me some proof.. or wait.. i will not be able to see it
Kill your TV
If there were a way to cause light to bend/reflect/refract around an object from any direction so as to appear ivisible, the person inside such bubble would by definition be blind - at least for the affected wavelengths. Another interesting property of such a bubble is that no light could get out - the path of light is reversible so if nothing gets in then nothing gets out. If all light is directed around, then none gets in or out, simple as that.
I, for one, welcome our new invisible overlords
The article states that light would be bent around you, which means it wouldn't reach you at all... Too bad, I do have a very cute neighbour... ;-)
There's a crazy guy in my old hometown who leaps up and down in the city centre screaming "I'm invisible!". Of course, everyone completely ignores him, which fuels his fantasy that he really is...
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5230/5230.txt
I think we should pursue H.G. Wells' theory:
"You make the glass invisible by putting it into a liquid of nearly
the same refractive index; a transparent thing becomes invisible if
it is put in any medium of almost the same refractive index. And if
you will consider only a second, you will see also that the powder
of glass might be made to vanish in air, if its refractive index
could be made the same as that of air; for then there would be no
refraction or reflection as the light passed from glass to air."
"...the whole fabric of a man except the red of his blood and the black
pigment of hair, are all made up of transparent, colourless tissue.
So little suffices to make us visible one to the other. For the
most part the fibres of a living creature are no more opaque than
water."
Just be in the range of a Protoss Arbiter - they cloak everything but other Arbiters. The Arbiters remain visible due to the massive khydarian energy required to fuel the field - the Khydarian disrupts the field immediatly about the Aribiter rendering it visible. Works sorta like electric fields, when you think about it. (Think electric fields in various surfaces, esp conducting shells.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
The problem is, if such device is made, the invisible woman will be blind. No light will reach her eyes, because if some does then it some absorbed on the retina and cannot be "bypassed" around anymore. So instead of a powerful invisible person we get a handciapped individual, whose position is especially bad because nobody can help her, 'cause the can't be seen!
I think invisibility will eventually be achieved, but it will be something like in the movie Predator. The special effects used for his 'invisibility' was actually very accurate. It didn't really make him invisible, but bent the light around him to make him very hard to see. Doesn't violate the laws of physics, and would be highly effective in most situations. In reality, I don't even think it would be that difficult to implement. (relatively speaking.)
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
This is very different tech to using a webcam/display to create the illusion of invisibility. This method uses exotic nanophotonic materials, such as arrays of tiny gold pillars which cause the material to have a negative refractive index, thus bending light in very strange ways compared to standard optical materials (the opposite direction to what you would expect). By creating a sheet of this material to the requiired size and with the optical properties it will redirect radiation around the object it is covering with no apparent distortion. almost like a bundle of optical fibres redirecting light around the object. Do a search for nanophotonics and photonic metamaterials for more details on this very interesting and extremely popular topic for research in nonlinear optics. Negative refraction can also be used for other things such as beating the diffraction limit in microscopy and may eventually find its way into the production of smaller transistors/components for microelectronic devices.
Mutual Assured Destruction has kept the nuclear powers-that-be in check for 60 years. A country that feels it has the technology to intercept incoming missles, and massively surprise its enemy (using stealth as discussed in this article), ... well that country might just decide it has to strike first, before its enemy achieves similar capabilities and makes the same judgement call.
Think about it. Your military advisers tell you that 1) you can intercept incoming missles (even from subs), and 2) deliver missles without being detected. In essence, they are saying you could launch a preemptive nuclear strike with mostly political, not military, consequences.
You are also advised that in a few years your enemy will have sufficient tecnology to do the same.
Suddenly M.A.D. is out the window, and replaced with a "whomever strikes first wins" scenario.
Put three guys in a room (U.S., China, Russia) blindfolded. Tell them the first that leaves the room will live, and the rest will die, but if they all stay put, they will all live. Then tell them there is unlimited power for the first one out the door. What do you think will happen?
Maybe it would come bundled with some sort of little flying drone(s) (maybe resembling an insect?) to beam a TV signal to an eyepiece worn by the invisible person. With some practice, one might be able to navigate to say, Jessica Alba's changing room.
"The irony when tending a flock of sheep is the dogs you put in place to protect them are genetically mutated wolves"
If standing inside a huge non-invisible device to bend light around you counts as being invisible, I'll just take my "Cloak of Invisibility"[==normal blanket] and get going to the patent office.
This article is about blocking EM from sensitive equipment. Stop shouting "invisible!"
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Let's just hope that when the invisible woman arrives, she's played more convincingly then Jessica Alba.
Then Jessica Alba what?
Make everything invisible except the eyeballs.
Even if you don't pass IR into the invisibility field, there's still likely to be detectable elements of the heat signature or other items radiated/expelled from the cloak that it still wouldn't render you undetectable. Ie, if I made a vehicle visually invisible its still likely to emit exhaust or a big EMF field from electric motors, people breathe, exhaling heat and CO2, etc.
"Invisibility" as defined as not providing a reflected-light image is the least significant part of the problem without also providing some way of eliminating other physical detection. It might be useful if you were cloaking a sealed, inanimate object that had no EMF or other signatures detectable, but I'm not sure it'd be cost effective against other low-tech methods for simply hiding something or otherwise camouflaging it.
I understand that that is the technology behind this, but can you imagine it being used in the field? Could soldiers run around and shoot while wearing these suits? Could tanks still fire their weapons if coated in this? What happens when they got dirty? It has been known to happen in wartime. Practically I think that the ghillie suit is superior in war when people do not want to be seen.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
So all I gotta do is carry a black hole in my pocket. That's gotta suck...
It wouldn't be long before black hole carries you!
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
obligator H2H2 post
I agree with you on the soldiers front. However, it wouldn't be too difficult to work in a similar way to current stealth technology on aircraft (once thay have made the materials!) and only working over a small wavelength range (at which radar operates). This technology is most likely to be used for RF shielding and applications other than invisibility. The invisibility aspect of these materials is very much a 'get the general public interested' tactic to help get research grants.At the present moment the idea of using this tech for making humans invisible is a long way off. Current samples of nanophotonic materials are generally very small due to the difficulty in manufacturing them.
William Shatner can be neither created nor destroyed.
How about "William Shatner... can be... neither created... nor destroyed."?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
None of this explains how to make things appear to be two hobos fighting over a wheel of cheese.
I'm gonna need a spec.
And its not going to be a potion
hmm... I wonder if there were a lot of people who actually thought it would be a potion?
Here is Strong Bad's take on invisibility.
"My chocolates! Come back, chocolates! I didn't mean what I said..."
Sorry, that should read:
To me, clear communication IS more impotent, then spelling.
The origin of that 'may' depends on how much scotch he is on at the moment. Plenty of scotch = absolutely possible. Sober (rare) = not possible. Usually it's in-between :)
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
In some standoff in the middle of nowhere the ATF used one of these. The vehicle had fiber optics on pointed on each side. It made the vehicle invisible (the movement basically looked like heat waves on the horizon). They drove an armored personnel carrier within 20ft of the front door. lets just say it suprised the hell out of the gunman standing by the front door.
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
What's so hard about this? Carry a camera on one side of you, and a big frameless plasma screen on the other. And lots of batteries on your back.
after all, we've had invisible tape for years.
Now what was his name again...
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
reading the brilliant fantasy novel "The Singularity is Near" by Ray Kurzweil lately. He talks about nano machines that are ingested to provide tracking functions, they disperse amongst your cells and reside within them. Now take this tech and design a nano machine that will take up residence in skin cells, create an intelligent network amongst them (perhaps using the nervous system for communication?) and deliver the light signals from the opposite side of the body to each machine's "complement" (much the same way the cloaks and fiber optic systems work now). now: invisibility, from nano machines dissolved in solution, a potion. my guess (using the patented PullItFromMyAss technique), circa 2045.
Doesn't modern RAM (RADAR Absorbing Material, not the DDR2 kind) do a good enough job of disrupting radar? Just look at the specs for the F-22.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
You know that everyone's going to be saying "ARG! I can't find my invisibility device again!" Maybe they should also invent the White Outline device like Wonder Woman had for her Invisible Jet.
The device could obviously be combined with something else to block the light, but it does bare mentioning that that won't be trivial either.
I'd still rather have the jetpack from yesterday (with the amazingly hokey website! He can invent a jetpack but can't take a few decent pictures???)
Keep passing the open windows!
You misspelled "possessive."
Its easy to be invisible and painful to proove.
Get on two wheels, powered or unpowered, ride in traffic and sooner rather than later you will find yourself splatered on the road or otherwise taken out.
Once off the bike and injured the response is always the same. Sorry mate didnt see you.
Nuff said.
Just paint the mountain pink and convince them it's not their problem.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
The devices could be used as protection mechanisms so the radiation emitted from mobile phones does not penetrate electronic equipment. It is guided around it.
Looks like that is possible now (replace electronic equipment with tin foil hat wearer's brain or simply paranoid nerd).
Could tanks still fire their weapons if coated in this?
Come on lad, Birds of Prey cannot fire when they are cloaked. That's Trek 101, basically.
I was watching Futurama the other day and Bender said that instead of Leela trying to find a man with only one eye, it would be easier for her to find a nice guy with two eyes and poke one of them out...
That got me thinking...
Damn, I'd need a lot of forks (or blindfolds for the squeamish).
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Doctor: Tell him I can't see him right now.
While this may be an apt description, water around a stone still creates turbulence that is detectable. I suspect that invisibility would be similar. You would see an area of distortion, much like the Predator in the Predator movies. It was still visible by the distortion, but much harder to pick out from the background. While not perfect, still highly useful for many occasions.
Forget foofy speculation.
I was more interested in some of the real articles linked from that page, such as "Chemicals in curry, onions may shrink colon polyps". I sit so long at my computer, it really aggravates my hemmeroids. Talk about news for nerds, and stuff that matters!
bORK!
I wonder how many of these military scientists are Treckies.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
played more convincingly then Jessica Alba.
:)
Hell, if that woman would be looking like Jessica Alba, then I sure wouldn't want her to be invisible, and I sure wouldn't care how convincingly she'd play anything
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Several posts have debated the issue of whether or not you could see if your retinae were invisible.
The issue here is being confused between points of view. If the objective of invisibility is, as I assume it would be, to be invisible to others and not invisible to one's self... then what's being convoluted in this debate is the fact that there's a difference of vectors between the light that is reflected back to you and the light that is reflected back to outside observers to whom you want to be invisible.
Consider that in order for you to see, light need only strike your retinae. It doesn't need to reflect back out to the outside observer for YOU to see. Therefore, whatever external mechanism... be it a cloak or a negative refraction index superlens (which, though they don't really clarify it in the article, is the technology to which they refer), that mechanism is being employed in this scenario to disperse the pathways of light that would normally reflect back to others... but you're behind the mechanism, so think of it as standing on the nonreflecting (translucent) side of a two-way mirror... that is, for lack of a more accurate analogy, what standing behind the refraction point of a superlens would be like.
However, conventional optics A normal lens will bend light traveling to it in both directions, within the diffraction limit. A mirror will bend light back in the direction from which it came (to an angle of reflection equal and opposite the angle of incidence), within the diffraction limit. A superlens, however, can bend light in directions not bound by the diffraction limit... the focus or diffusion of which can be manipulated electronically.
The light reflecting off you back to other observers is bent, not the light reflecting off OTHER objects TO you. The fact that your smooth retinal surfaces occasionally do reflect light has absolutely nothing to do with how you see. That surface has to actually be somewhat transparent because the rods and cones that collect light and transmit it via the optic nerve to the brain are BEHIND, not in front of, the reflective retinal membrane. This is of course one reason why human vision is far from perfect.
One thing people always forget is how much social co-operation is involved when moving around/though other people. People don't try and walk though you in a crowd. On a battlefield, you don't shoot in a particular direction because a friendly is there. You don't change lanes on the motorway because you know there's a car present or is overtaking you.
Individual invisibility breaks these cooperative behaviors. If there's an opening in a crowd, someone will probably try and use it. Soldiers/tanks will shoot at targets without respect for their invisible buddy in the line of fire. How many times have you changed course in a crowd and bumped into someone because you thought that direction was clear? An invisible person would have to be continuously watching everyone around him to dodge out of their way.
Possibly extremely fat chicks can bend light with the mass that they displace rendering them invisible.
Or...
Scotty should have another drink and be quite.
Hehe... he called communitcation more impotent then spelling. Hehe... impotent...
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
The professor was unavailable for comment.
Witnesses report that he was last seen heading across campus in the direction of the women's locker rooms..
Even more, if it works as it sounds (sending light around the hidden person/object) that means that no light is reaching inside the invisibility shell. So, whatever is inside that shell will be completely blind.
In one of the recent James Bond movies he had a car that became
invisible by use of cameras and projectors. The car projected an image
seen from one side of the car onto the side facing the other way.
In this way no matter how you looked at the car it was like you
were looking through it. At least that's how Q described it.
Active camafloge sorta.
Who said that?
FRA: STFU GTFO
What, are, you, on, aboot, u, maroon?!!
This, being slashdot, and highly g33k4 u be down an be hating on wut it is we be written?
Sorry, channeling my Digg profile.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
If some "bubble" capable of bending light were invented, what would others see right where you are standing? Just an empty shadow?
I don't want her to be invisible. Naked, maybe.
Do you have ESP?
One of the challenges in accomplishing invisibility, will be your own visability. If all light is bending around you, and no photons are making their way to your retina, then how do you see?....
You would have to use some alternative spectrum?.... maybe uv would work?
...I'd prefer she was visible.
you had me at #!
Not to mention: "Slashdot" should have been capitalized. "English" should have been capitalized. "Slashdot", once again, should have been capitalized. "Possessive" was spelled incorrectly. "Nazis" should be capitalized. "Third-grade" should be hyphenated. "Dropouts" should be considered all one word, or hyphenated.
I just don't see how this could be possible...
...motorcyclists for the past 80 years.
I don't think so. She's more in the style of Edward Norton, someone who doesn't let the movie get in the way of her performance. Brian Cox and Chloe Sevigny, now those are some subtle actors.
There was also a good piece on the invisibility question about 2 weeks ago in Science News , my favorite technical magazine. Its way better than any jerk wire-service story.
If the light's bending around you, how are you supposed to see? Either the light hits you and you can see, or it doesn't and you're stumbling around blind and invisible...
Tluin natha Linux xxizzuss uriu olt bwael mon'tun.
to women under 30.
Verbum caro factum est
This type of technology offers an important possiblity that I have yet to see mentioned--protection from solar flares and cosmic radiation while on long space flights, such as to say Mars.
What is communitcation?
You know, I hadn't thought of that. In that case, I can only imagine that this would be useful for creating sensory deprivation tanks when combined with some form of sound insulation.
Hey, can I bum a sig?
I hear breast enhancement can make a womans face disappear.
Though, apparently, it only works on men.
So I hear anyway. Hmmm, food for thought.
A better way to become invisible is not to bend light but to change it's frequency. For example you could (energy and health problems aside) create a field that multiples the light frequency in some specific way (for example, divides wavelenght by 50) so your body becomes transparent to it since it is in the X-Ray range. Then, when the light comes out of the field it is returned to the visible spectra. Or photons could be transformed into large quantities of non interacting particles (such as neutrinos) and then back to light. That way you are invisible and the system doesn't have to bend light and then get it back in the direction and exact line it was going for every possible point in the covered area and in every direction at the same time (the problem with current cloaking devices, they only work from a specific angle). As for how to see, the system could implement a smaller field surrounding your eyes doing the inverse process. If it is working for some small fraction of the particles (something like 10%) your eyes would be barely visible, and you would still be able to see in a well lit environment.
Yogis have been turning invisible for thousands of years. You can do it too! Everything you need to know is contained in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. My favourite is the edition by Swami Satchitananda. Get into it! It's the ultimate hi-tech!
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
If the invisible object does not reflect light, and absorbs it instead, what will the outsiders see when looking at it? A dark spot?
We expect the invisible object to be 100% transparent, such that by looking through it we'll see the things behind it. But since the approach being discussed is not about transparency, it employs the absorbtion or rays instead.....
Who can explain?
The saddest poem
...that it works both ways? "Wow, I'm invisible! Only I can't go anywhere or do anything because I can't see where I'm going."
Is it just me, or should have mdm42 posted this under the title "How to Disappear Completely"?
I heart anarcho-capitalism.
It's an energy distribution problem, and last I checked the tanks had not been equiped with Type III or Type IV phasers, and still use projectiles. So it'd be safe to assume they'd be able to fire. however I'm sure the puff of smoke from the proectile launch would give their position away.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
If the invisible object does not reflect light, and absorbs it instead, what will the outsiders see when looking at it? A dark spot?
Yes. Lack of light looks like something black.
But since the approach being discussed is not about transparency, it employs the absorbtion or rays instead.....
The article I read talked about bending light waves around an object, like water moving around a rock in a stream, except with water flowing towards it in all directions simultaneously. I'm not sure where you got the idea that this was about absorbing them.
Maybe a silly question (I ain't no theoretical physicist), but the average body temperature being 98.6F, how do they propose to hide that? It seems the article is strictly talking naked-eye visibility, but this will not be of much help in a military application.
to be optimistic, invisibility will be possible, but not anytime soon. current advances in optical technology are not leading us anywhere to that goal. while talking about bending light, its therotically possible. but the practical difficulties would be too many to even describe... which makes me wonder - what is the the big deal in becoming invisible?
How can they create something that's invisible, when they don't even know the difference between invisible and transparent? I know, maybe my knowledge and undestanding of these two concepts differs from you english people, but "Invisible" only means material or object, that does not reflect light at all. Transparent means material or object, that does reflect light, so the eye believes there is nothing there. I do understand the "philosophical" flaw of my point of the view. If object does not reflect light, eye can tell where and by the shape of the object, what it is, therefor making it less invisible. But even if your brain can add things up and tell you things about the object, the object itself remains invisible..so there is no flaw.